Monday Monday

Why the heck am I posting about Monday on a Saturday, you ask? Okay, possibly it’s Sunday off in New Zealand or wherever, idk. But the point is we should be soaking up every delicious morsel of weekend fun without worrying about Monday ookies.

However!

There’s an exception to every rule. Well, maybe not to the rule that says there’s an exception to every rule because then that would mean there’d be no exception to… huh? Let me untangle my brain. K.

THE POINT IS… I forgot what the point is. Oh yeah. I’m going to start a new prompt on Monday! Wahooooo! It’s actually an old prompt called The Monday Peeve that I used to have on an old blog. People liked it, many people… 😂. Now that Di has stepped up to do the 3TC, I have only my Thursday Inspiration, so I’m free for another weekly prompt. This one is fun!

However2! This prompt probably won’t be for everyone, and that’s okay. Some of you like to stick with the uplifting, cheerful, positive posts, which I understand. TMP is gonna be about venting ~ some of us need that sometimes. I know I do! I’ll start with a theme, and those who wish to participate can stay with my theme or post about whatever peeve is on their mind, since there’s nothing more annoying than someone telling you what to vent about when you’re in the mood to vent!

However3! I do reserve the right not to accept linkbacks to any posts I find personally offensive, which could be any damn thing. You never know. But you should know. You know? Just be a normal decent human being ~ is that too much to ask?

~*~

©️2019 Paula Light and Light Motifs II. No unauthorized use permitted. Please check out Paula’s books for sale on Amazon

Blogger Leadership Award

I would like to extend a hearty thanks to Rory @ A Guy Called Bloke for gifting me this award a few days ago. I don’t see myself as a leader, so I was very surprised by his kindness. 💖

The award was created by Nova @ Nova’s Namaste 365 Online: “This was created to nominate 1-2 individuals who have exemplified noticeable and noteworthy leadership. That could be in any way. There’s no questions or need to thank me. I also don’t require you to nominate others, although I think it would be a kind gesture.”

The lovely thing about this award is that it truly is a gift. The presenters are simply mentioning a few bloggers for their recent noteworthy contributions to the blogging community and thanking them for it. Nothing is required of them. 🙂

Today I would like to present the award to Di @ Pensitivity101 and Jim @ A Unique Title For Me.

Di has consistently great posts about a variety of topics ~ health & diet, recipes, a variety of humor slices, her sweet dog Maggie, family life, home repair, etc., plus lovely fiction and poetry, and now she’s stepped up to host the 3TC Challenge to boot. Definitely leadership quality there, Di! 🎉

Jim is hilarious, but you have to read his posts carefully to find all the gems. He often does fabulous mashups of song lyrics, turning them into mini-stories, and I’m not ashamed to admit I stole this idea for a few of my own. Jim has been hosting the very popular Song Lyric Sunday for some time now, and he also shares hosting of other prompts too. He is a worthy recipient of this award! 🎶

Happy weekend, everyone! 😻

~*~

©️2019 Paula Light and Light Motifs II. No unauthorized use permitted. Please check out Paula’s books for sale on Amazon.

Sunday Night Blahs

Later tonight my 3TC post will pop into the feed ~ I have 10 more scheduled. These 10 include an announcement that September 10 will be the end of my 3TC hosting. Please let me know if you’d like to host (it’s fun!), and I’ll add your name to the remaining posts so people are aware. I’ve done 178 of these posts now (including the ones coming up), and it’s time for me to move on.

I will continue my Thursday Inspiration prompts because I really enjoy doing those. I don’t always write something myself, but I find it inspirational to search for the music to go with the picture. I’ve been using my Happy Color app pictures, which make me… happy. 🙂

I’ve done two audiobooks and am really disappointed that the narrators don’t seem to be helping out with any marketing. I thought we were in this together. Oh well. It was a good experiment, I guess, but it took a lot of time (and these were short books!), so I won’t be doing more. In a way, I’m glad my 200 page romance novel never got going as an audiobook because that would have taken forever to review.

From time to time, I get bummed out about writing generally, and this is one of those times. I never seem to get anywhere. I don’t have time to market like you’re supposed to, and nothing I write is great enough or lucky enough to simply take off without that. Yes, I write because I love to, but after all these years, it’s depressing not to have made any money at it.

I recently encountered a published poet and his stuff was just so bad… I don’t get it. Not saying my stuff is great or even good. But it’s so random and frustrating what gets attention and what gets published. Same as it’s ever been, I suppose.

Notwithstanding all this whining, there are still lots of good things in my life, just not any good writing news is all. Idk if I want to continue toiling away during my free time finishing all the OCD items on my writing to-do list just to keep seeing a flat line on my sales reports. I could just… stop.

I don’t mean stop blogging. This is just the tip of the iceberg. I have loads of writing in progress. Romance novels in various stages of completion. A murder mystery love story half-done. Stories for anthologies. Finished books I want to edit again. It’s ridiculous.

Happy September. 🐱

~*~

© 2019 Paula Light and Light Motifs II. No unauthorized use permitted. Please check out Paula’s books for sale on Amazon.

Kerfuffle [socs]

This whole blog theft kerfuffle has caused an astronomical amount of disruption in our once peaceful little community. 😱

First, let’s consider the good things. What? How can there be good things? Well, how about the fact that lots of us immediately joined together in support and sympathy for each other, sharing info and strategy and trying to keep each other’s spirits up? I’d say that’s pretty great. 💖

But yeah, other than that… disruption, upheaval, anger, cursing, murderous rage… okay, those last two were mostly me, but I do tend to get a bit carried away. 😡

We have people talking about passwording their blogs (which I’ve done before and is a pain in the butt), and we now have one valued writer who has shut down her three blogs due to the theft. No one has received any satisfaction from contacting Digital Ocean, the hosting provider for the thieves.

I am considering making some changes to my blog because of this stressful situation. While I do not normally post anything but the tiniest excerpts from my published (or wannabe published) fiction, I still intensely dislike the idea of this disgusting bot spider grabbing all my posts and plopping them somewhere else, even with a linkback.

But I don’t know what changes yet. I like everything the way it is, and I don’t want to change my ways due to their bad behavior. I’m trying to shrug off the mess because I want to focus on having a productive yet restful weekend, and it’s going well so far. (I am writing this late Friday night and will schedule it to post 1AM Saturday.) 🌸

If you don’t post big chunks of work you intend to publish, you should be alright except for the annoyance factor. I’ve self-published poetry that I’ve blogged and the Amazon bot found it, but they asked if it was mine and I said yes, so that was fine. I vaguely remember things called “splash” pages back in the day… your updated posts were not on that main page. It took an extra click (AN EXTRA CLICK OMG WHO HAS TIME?) to get to the blog. But we all read by feed now, or most/many of us do. I wonder if the spiders would be thwarted by a splash page?

One of y’all will know, I’m sure. 🙂

Update on the Thing

I don’t want to keep naming THEM, in case new people don’t know what’s what and go visit, thus generating more traffic to the Bad Place. Those who know will know. You know?

So, the thieves are now linking back to me at the end of each of my posts with my blog name and Paula Light, naming me as the source of the post. It’s like a reblog in that way, except still hostile because generally reblogs are occasional when something is of particular interest, not lifting every post.

I think I’m going to be done with this mess. I’m so stressed out as it is I can’t allow these jerkfaces to dominate my mind any longer. I have three audiobooks in production right now! My throat hurts, my head aches, my toe throbs, work awaits, chores languish, writing beckons, events glare… it’s ridonkulous.

I suggest you do what I did though, if you are not being credited as the source of your own posts and given a clickable link back at the Bad Place. Contact Digital Ocean and fill out their DCMA form via the front page menu.

Then try to put it out of your mind forever.

Fuck

Fuck fuck fuck fuck.

It’s just a word. But I understand if you don’t like it. There are words I hate too, but they’re ethnic slurs, not curse words. I don’t even mind derogatory names for women, if they’re said in the spirit of fun and flirting. Who decides that? Well, me. Duh!

But back to the F-bomb. You know who else doesn’t like fuck? Those fucking thieves at tygpress. It’s the one word you can search for there that gives you blank results. Damn and shit are apparently okay with them, but fuck is a no-go. So random.

I discovered this by chance when I realized that my post cursing them out wasn’t on their site with the rest of the writing they are stealing from me continuously (along with all y’all). So, I began searching for various words, etc.

Like several of you, I’ve contacted GoDaddy and Digital Ocean with takedown notices and… nothing. GoDaddy says they don’t host the fucking thieves, so too bad, so sad. Digital Ocean doesn’t respond at all. It’s been an education in how little you can actually do when someone decides to be a blatant anonymous asshole online.

I tried a couple things in the meantime. One, I switched the name of my blog to Light Fucking Motifs to see if my posts would then vanish from the bad place, but nothing changed after the transition. So, I switched it back. Two, I tagged a post that was on the bad site with #fuck to see if it would disappear, and no. It stayed. This leads me to conclude that the actual word fuck needs to be in the content of the post for their bots to pick it up and reject it.

Obviously I’ve been spending way too much time brooding over this. Why? Idk. I guess journalists are resigned to the fact that everything they write will be reposted somewhere else, maybe with a link to the source, maybe not. Eventually you learn to shrug it off. It’s so frustrating when it first happens though! The thieves could link back to us, like a blogroll. What’s the big deal? Why are they being such dicks? No one is going to read/follow blogs from their site, since the format sucks. I guess they just want to turn into an enormous search engine or something and then sell ads by saying look at all these clicks.

And you know we’re helping them every time we go there. 🤮

So… am I going to put a little fuck in every post? Will my OCD compel me to go back and sneak a tiny fonted fuck at the end of my old published posts? That’s just absurd!

Sigh… 🙄

UPDATE: This post is now on the theft site. So idk what. It doesn’t come up in a specific search, but it does partially show under my site name with a snippet of the F-bombs intact. It is not clickable to a full post like the others.

UPDATE 2: They are now linking back to my blog twice by blog name and with Paula Light at the end of every post, just like a reblog, naming me as the source. Okay. I’m done.

Happy 4th! (with bonus rant)

My latest discovery, which I will share, is that everything is ridiculously complicated and costs too damn much.

In my youth, life was simple (although frequently unhappy). My mom did many things herself, but now these projects are out of reach. Take knitting and crocheting and sewing, forex. Loading up on the supplies costs a fortune and the patterns are complicated, wah. Don’t even get me started on scrapbooking (again) or making bead jewelry. Soooo costly! Plus, in my case, I’d have to take classes first, for jewelry, sewing, cooking, etc. I’m not one who can watch a video for twenty minutes and then go mmhmm now I see how to construct a tiny house, easy peasy!

I remember we usually had an aquarium going on. My mom dealt with it, but it could not have been outrageously expensive because we weren’t wealthy and we lived in small apartments for many years. The aquariums were really pretty, but the fish died often, and we were always traipsing off to the pet store for little baggies of new ones. I bet now though aquariums are just another one of those crazy costly and super complex hobbity bobbity things.

I liked watching the bright little neons dart through the water after their specks of food. We had graceful black and white stripey fish and some goldfish varieties too. A few catfish at the bottom keeping things clean. Mom always indulged me and got a teeny pirate treasure chest for decoration in the sand. Haven’t thought about our aquariums for years…

Ah yes, the sands of time, rushing so fast through the hourglass now, piling up at the bottom, waiting to meet that last big wave that will wash them out to the eternal ocean and then… and then what?

Nothing.

*

You know, I feel I’m pretty chill with anyone who comments here unless they’re an obvious spammer or troll. If you’re of a different political persuasion, cool, just keep it civil and don’t insult other peeps or me. I have accepted loads of criticism and disagreements over the years. Don’t mind it at all, and I particularly welcome any comments on my poetry and fiction. I am not thrilled with advice I haven’t solicited, especially about health, but whatever.

But that’s not the case elsewhere. Some bloggers don’t want any disagreement or difference of opinion. I’ve noticed I will be condescended to or explained at if I dare to express a thought contrary to the OP’s. That is unpleasant, FYI, and I will not be visiting these blogs much or at all in the future.

YHBW. 🙂

Have a great weekend! ☄️💥🔥

Oopsy

Some of you may have seen a 3TC slip through the fabric of time and appear at 10AM today instead of 10PM. That was not some sort of weird bend in the universe, but human error… mine. This should put to rest those pesky rumors that I am a bot, since a bot would not screw up. I suppose a bot could be programmed to screw up to seem more human-like however. Ooh.

In any case, I rescheduled the stray post to return tonight as it should, so if you’re one of those suck-ups who do homework in advance to get brownie points, the link is not going to work until later. You can preen though at the thought of having your 3TC finished before others and then run off to do something productive. Oh, who are we kidding, right? You’ll be glued to your screen as usual, waiting for your next hit of posts.

Probably for the best. At least we’re safe in Blogland surrounded by supportive folks and not in the scary wilds of Usenet or FB or some other mean place. Yikes!

Another Award! 🤩

A big bouquet 💐 of thanks goes out to Tanya of Salted Caramel for nominating me for this award! Very lovely of her to think of me. I enjoy her blog as well.💖

Now I’m to talk about how my blog began. As I’ve mentioned, this isn’t my first blog; that one started way back in 2003 or so, simply because other writers had one. Yep, I’m a follower, not a leader. My posts were snarky and intended to start arguments in order to generate traffic, which they did, but it was still low compared to the hot blogs at the time. Back then, I was obsessed with stats.

But I got hoisted by my own petard, as they say. (Do they actually say that? And what is a petard anyway?) Long story short, I ended up in an huge kerfuffle over pit bulls, of all things, and my comments got hacked… it was quite a mess.

I don’t like mess. What I generally do when things get messy, ugly, yucky, or in any way unpleasant, is GTFO. And Ultrablog was no exception. I archived and deleted it.

A while later, I began a second blog. This one was incredibly boring. Deliberately so. I posted only about cats, cupcakes, and shoes ~ in fact, that was the name of the blog. But I did have a private one where I posted more personal things and invited selected readers whom I trusted.

After my mom died, the private blog had pretty much served its purpose, and I was bored with CC&S. So, I began Light Motifs on Blogger. I held the WordPress address just in case… and then it turned out I wanted to switch over in 2009 due to some annoyances with Blogger.

Back then, I posted infrequently compared to now, maybe a few times per week. I’d post song lyrics and other people’s poetry, book reviews and excerpts, etc. It was all regarding my emotional state at the time, which was a mix of hope and despair over a romance. After that ended and I went onto dating sites, this blog became a pit of bitching about that. I went through several cycles of deleting those posts, which is why the years between 2012-2017 have giant gaps in them.

Since I’ve quit dating and facebooking, I’ve not deleted any posts here. I’m more mindful of what I write in the first place, which is my first piece of advice to new bloggers (we’re supposed to give two bits of advice in this award post). Even if you don’t have many followers yet, try to keep in mind that your posts are public and envision an audience when you write. Make each post the best it can be, and give something of yourself to your audience, whether it’s a personal anecdote or an original creative writing or photo. Don’t just link to another site without comment. That’s no fun. 😢

And for heaven’s sake, never mention pit bulls! 😱🐶🤯

I’ll stop here because I don’t like to tag people for awards. I hereby nominate all my recent commenters for this one ~ you’re recognized! Grab the award and make a post. G’wan… don’t be shy! 😀

Just Noticed This…

Yeah, yeah, it includes Twitter, so…

But still! 😀🎉💖👍🏻🎶